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Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2024 August 11

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August 11

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Overthrowing the Bolsheviks

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Did any prominent Americans seriously advocate in favor of a large-scale US military intervention (astronomically larger than the one in real life) to overthrow the Bolsheviks during the Russian Civil War? If so, which ones and when?

Seems like a logical move for the US to do since it wasn't anywhere near as badly weakened by WWI as the various other Great Powers were (other than Japan, which was located too far away from European Russia). And with the benefit of hindsight, it could have been even in the US's own interests since this might have meant no subsequent US participation in a Second World War as well as in wars in Korea and Vietnam.

Also, such a US move would have made Russia free and "safe for democracy", which one would think that Woodrow Wilson would have appreciated, with his pro-democracy and pro-liberty rhetoric. 172.59.128.60 (talk) 04:56, 11 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Not answering your question, but your comments — bear in mind that the US was very isolationist immediately after the end of the war. Much of Wilson's political capital was spent on his unsuccessful campaign for ratification of the peace treaty with Germany that ended the war; the Senate refused ratification because the treaty required participation in the internationalist League of Nations, so the US signed a separate peace treaty. Just two years after the war's end, Wilson's replacement Warren Harding was elected on a strongly isolationist platform. Between those events, just eleven months after the war ended and several months before the treaty's defeat, Wilson suffered an incapacitating stroke; at points he was bedridden, and his wife controlled almost everything (see Edith Wilson#Increased role after husband's stroke), so he wasn't in a place to go campaigning for another war. And finally, the US had other domestic concerns; the First Red Scare occupied most US anti-communist attention, and a postwar depression affected Americans' finances. Nyttend (talk) 20:02, 11 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
One would have thought that the First Red Scare would have made Americans more hawkish in regards to Russia. Remove the Bolshevik threat at its root, so to speak. 172.59.128.60 (talk) 20:22, 11 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The answer would be something like "but that's overseas, and we just sent our boys overseas to fight a useless foreign war, so let's keep them at home and deal with our own problems". Nyttend (talk) 20:52, 11 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Was WWI already perceived as being useless in 1919-1920? Anti-German propaganda was still entrenched in people's memories back then, I would think? 172.59.128.60 (talk) 21:10, 11 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, after the war's end American popular opinion very quickly moved toward seeing it as a catastrophic waste of lives and money that could have been saved by staying out (otherwise the Treaty wouldn't have been rejected), and the wartime anti-German sentiment was quickly seen as preposterous. Nyttend (talk) 21:43, 11 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The Americans were supporting the White Russians during the civil war - Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War should have the details. -- asilvering (talk) 21:17, 11 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The question asks about an intervention "astronomically larger than the one in real life", so 172.59.128.60 is already aware of that. Nyttend (talk) 21:43, 11 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

The OP might also bear in mind that the task of making "Russia free and 'safe for democracy'" might involve a little bit more than decapitating the Red leadership.

Nobody was delusional enough to want to join a new war right after winning "the war to end all wars". Donald "I'm a stable genius" Trump hadn't been born yet. Clarityfiend (talk) 06:57, 12 August 2024 (UTC) [reply]

Bear in mind that other Communist revolutions, e.g. throughout Germany and in Hungary, lasted only a few months. Through the summer of 1919, interventionists perhaps wouldn't care about backward Russia as much as they would about the more developed states of Germany and Hungary. Marxist orthodoxy held that a revolution of the proletariat demanded a significant-size proletariat in the first place — which Russia didn't have — so people who had studied Marx might have anticipated Russian Communism to fall apart faster than German and Hungarian Communism. By the end of the summer of 1919, German and Hungarian collapses could give further reasons to anticipate that Russian Communism wouldn't last a long time either. (Why waste money and men intervening in a war where they weren't needed?) Also, since the Whites controlled significant sections of Russia and were maintaining active and organised military opposition to the communists, interventionists would have had less reason to advocate for sending a large-scale military intervention. Nyttend (talk) 07:35, 13 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Multinational states or empires collapsing and millions of co-ethnics being left stranded outside of their respective nation-state?

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Which cases have there been of multinational states or empires collapsing and millions of co-ethnics being left stranded outside of their respective nation-state? Off the top of my head:

In all of these cases, there were also subsequent revanchist wars (World War II in the first two cases, some of the Yugoslav Wars, specifically those in Bosnia and Croatia, in the third case, and the current Russo-Ukrainian War in the fourth case.

There are also a couple of other examples of this:

What else qualifies for this? 172.59.128.60 (talk) 05:31, 11 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

What is a co-ethnic? HiLo48 (talk) 06:13, 11 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Iraqi Turkmen and Syrian Turkmen after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1918. Turks in the Balkans could also count. StellarHalo (talk) 08:25, 11 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@HiLo48: Some clues here Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2024 February 27. 2A02:C7B:21D:5400:40DC:49E9:7557:F298 (talk) 10:06, 11 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Clues maybe, but I'm still confused. HiLo48 (talk)
I think "co-ethnics" is shorthand for "people of the same ethnicity". 2A02:C7B:21D:5400:40DC:49E9:7557:F298 (talk) 10:22, 11 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Yep! 172.59.128.60 (talk) 19:11, 11 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Likely almost any event in which significant territory and associated population shifted polities would meet some version of this question. Any answer will need to define the terms being used, but pick a conflict and you'll probably be able to find an example. CMD (talk) 10:24, 11 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
See also White Africans of European ancestry. Alansplodge (talk) 11:41, 11 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
In which case White Americans of European Ancestry and Black Americans of African Ancestry (inter alia) are WP articles of importance. --Cookatoo.ergo.ZooM (talk) 16:08, 11 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Maybe not the same; the African Americans were forcibly displaced rather than being stranded colonisers, and the American Colonists displaced themselves. Alansplodge (talk) 18:39, 11 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I haven't read it but:
  • Orizio, Riccardo (2001). Lost white tribes: the end of privilege and the last colonials in Sri Lanka, Jamaica, Brazil, Haiti, Namibia, and Guadeloupe (1st Free Press ed.). New York: Free Press. ISBN 0743211979.
  • Orizio, Riccardo (2001). Lost white tribes: the end of privilege and the last colonials in Sri Lanka, Jamaica, Brazil, Haiti, Namibia, and Guadeloupe (1st Free Press ed.). New York: Free Press. ISBN 9780743211970.
seemed interesting when I read about it, especially the part about the Poles in Haiti. I think that the original is in Italian.
--Error (talk) 19:16, 11 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Keep in mind that this would have to refer almost entirely to the last 300 years or so, because before that there were very few nation states. - Jmabel | Talk 21:55, 15 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

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